Spies ?

[Jenarie]

Hello

I've been playing Civ 2 for a long time and consider it the best game ever. One of the things I did a lot in Civ 2 was send spies out to "buy" enemy cities.

I've been reading this site for about a week (first the webpage then these forums for a couple days) and haven't found anything about my question - I appologize if I missed it somewhere as I'm still learning my way around.

I build embassies and get espionage. That seems to work normally. Then I try to plant a spy. It doesn't let me chose where I want it to go - the cities don't highlight - apparently the spy always goes to the enemy capitol. So far I'm ok. But then I want to use my spy to start propaganda and in all the games I've played so far (~10) I've never been able to get that to work. I have the spy and I can chose propaganda but then I can't chose a city or get it to progress any further.

Am I doing something wrong? Is this possibly a bug that has been corrected in a patch? I haven't downloaded any patches because I'm on dial up atm.

Side question - I bought Civ III Complete and I've looked at the patch page a few times but I'm unclear on which if any I should download. Does Complete include all the patches?

Thanks so much for the help. I'm a message board addict so I look forward to spending more time here and getting to know everyone.

 

[paulfish]

Welcome

Your spy is in the capital city .


You can only do propaganda against other civs only if they are not in a democarcy as they a then immune to propaganda.

I think complete has all the updates.


have a Merry Chirstmas and a Happy New Year

 

[Tomoyo]

Also, propaganda is very unlikely to work on big cities. "Big" means two citizens or more. You also need a lot of cultural pressure on the city in question.

 

[Jenarie]

Thank you!

I didn't think to see if the civ was a democracy before trying it so that was probably it.

I tend to build everything. I know its bad but I can't help it. The only win I've had so far was an accidental "cultural win" which surprised me and ended the game about 15 turns before I would have suffered a humiliating time defeat. So switching little cities due to culture sometimes happens to me even when I'm not trying but I figured with propaganda it would happen faster.

I'm enjoying this game a lot although I think so far I liked Civ2 better. Maybe once I get used to it I'll change my mind though. I lost my Civ2 CD when I moved so I can't go back.

 

[DragonRunner]

AFAIK, I have never seen ANYONE on this forum talk about using propaganda. I never use it. Spies can do much better things, like revealing enemy troop locations or stealing a rival's world map.

 

[Tomoyo]

Never? Click on the Ank11 link in my sig.

 

[braclayrab]

Accidental Cultural Victory?! You ARE a builder! Welcome to the club.

 

[John Lenin]

Hello Jenarie, I'm a new Civ3 player too, as well as a former Civ2-er. I shuddered when I read the title of this post, as the espionage screen pitched me into a massive world war. My first full game of Civ3 and I innocently try to plant a spy with the Romans - 'safely', as the screen said. Wrong. The Romans caught the spy and declared war on me. What with one thing and another, mutual protection pacts and all, I have only just managed to make peace after being at war with EVERY other civ on the map at the same time. I escaped the war having lost 'only' two cities, but the war economy I had to adopt means I'm so far behind on techs now that I don't know what I'll do. Oh well.